The United States and the War on Drugs in Mexico, 1940–1980

Pérez Ricart’s chapter (in Pansters, Smith, and Watt’s edited volume) on the bilateral shaping of Mexican drug policy between 1940 and 1980. Using recently declassified US documents, it reconstructs the scope and geography of FBN and DEA operations in Mexico, arguing that the punitive paradigm took root not simply through US imposition but through a convergence of US agency pressure, local elite ambitions to extend state authority into peripheral regions, a colonial-era repressive tradition toward psychoactive substances, and widespread Mexican racism.

The chapter’s most striking contribution is its demonstration that during the Dirty War (1969–78), federal elites used the resources and discretionary powers created by the war on drugs to intimidate and repress student activists, revolutionary peasants, and other “internal enemies” — embedding the drug economy in the centralized federal political order that succeeded the Sinaloa-style narcopopulism of the 1940s.